Tag Archives: Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Disrupting the arts scene around the world and in Vancouver (Canada)

I have two news bits of news for this post. First, the theme for the 2015 International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA) to be held in Vancouver, Canada from Aug. 14 – 18, 2015 is Disruption and the deadline for submitting proposals for research papers and art installations is Dec. 20, 2014 (ETA Dec. 22, 2014: The deadline for long art or research papers, short art or research papers, art or research extended abstracts with demonstration or poster presentation, panels, workshops, tutorials and institutional presentations has been extended to Jan. 12, 2014; the deadline for artwork submissions remains Dec. 20, 2014). Here’s more about the symposium from the About page,

ISEA is one of the world’s most prominent international arts and technology events, bringing  together scholarly, artistic, and scientific domains in an interdisciplinary discussion and showcase of creative productions applying new technologies in art, interactivity, and electronic and digital media. The event annually brings together artists, designers, academics, technologists, scientists, and general audience in the thousands. The symposium consists of a peer reviewed conference, a series of exhibitions, and various partner events—from large scale interactive artwork in public space to cutting edge electronic music performance.

In the last four years ISEA has been hosted in Istanbul (2011), Albuquerque, New Mexico (2012), and Sydney, Australia (2013), and Dubai (2014). ISEA2015 in Vancouver marks its return to Canada, 20 years since the groundbreaking first Canadian ISEA1995 in Montréal. The Symposium will be held at the Woodward’s campus of Simon Fraser University in downtown Vancouver with exhibitions and events taking place at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and many other sites and venues throughout the city.

The series of ISEA symposia is coordinated by ISEA International. Founded in the Netherlands in 1990, ISEA International (formerly Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) is an international non-profit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and technology. ISEA International Headquarters is supported by the University of Brighton (UK).

Here’s more from the Theme page,

ISEA2015’s theme of DISRUPTION invites a conversation about the aesthetics of change, renewal, and game-changing paradigms. We look to raw bursts of energy, reconciliation, error, and the destructive and creative forces of the new. Disruption contains both blue sky and black smoke. When we speak of radical emergence we must also address things left behind. Disruption is both incremental and monumental.

In practices ranging from hacking and detournement to inversions of place, time, and intention, creative work across disciplines constantly finds ways to rethink or reconsider form, function, context, body, network, and culture. Artists push, shape, break; designers reinvent and overturn; scientists challenge, disprove and re-state; technologists hack and subvert to rebuild.

Disruption and rupture are fundamental to digital aesthetics. Instantiations of the digital realm continue to proliferate in contemporary culture, allowing us to observe ever-broader consequences of these effects and the aesthetic, functional, social and political possibilities that arise from them.

Within this theme, we want to investigate trends in digital and internet aesthetics and revive exchange across disciplines. We hope to broaden the spheres in which disruptive aesthetics can be explored, crossing into the worlds of science, technology, design, visual art, contemporary and media art, innovation, performance, and sound.

I encourage you to read the whole Theme page if you’re interested in making a proposal as the organizers have outlined many approaches to the main theme. Good luck to everyone making a submission (and that includes me). I will be submitting a proposal  with my co-author, Raewyn Turner, an artist from New Zealand, for Steep (I): a digital poetry of gold nanoparticles. (I’ll be writing more about our Steep project soon (hopefully next week Dec. 22 – 25, 2014.)

For the second bit of news, Emily Carr University of Art + Design received grants for two Canada Research Chairs in Oct. 2014. Here’s more from the Recipients List (Note: I have made some changes to the formatting),

Frid-Jimenez, Amber     Emily Carr University of Art + Design     Canada Research Chair in Art and Design Technology     SSHRC [funding agency: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council]     [Tier] 2     New [position]
Hertz, Garnet     Emily Carr University of Art + Design     Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts     SSHRC     2     New

A Nov. 22, 2014 blog post on Emily Carr University’s The Big Idea blog provides more detail about the appointments,

Emily Carr University of Art + Design is honoured to announce the appointment of Associate Professors Amber Frid-Jimenez and Dr. Garnet Hertz to Canada Research Chairs recently published by the Government of Canada. This historic milestone marks the first Canada Research Chair appointments for Emily Carr University of Art + Design recognizing the institution’s capacity, faculty and contributions-to-date in the fields of art, media and design research. …

… “We are honoured that our University and the work of Dr. Garnet Hertz and Amber Frid-Jimenez are being recognized by the Government of Canada,” said David Bogen, Vice President Academic + Provost, Emily Carr University of Art + Design. “The appointment of our first Canada Research Chairs is significant at every level – for our institution’s culture of research, for our academic programs, and for our students who will work directly with some of today’s greatest artists, designers, and scholars in their prospective fields.” … Associate Professor Amber Frid-Jimenez is an awarding-winning interaction and print designer who has taught design studios and seminars at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Visual Arts Program, the National Arts Academy (KHiB) in Bergen, Norway, and most recently at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She holds a Masters in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab where she studied with John Maeda. Associate Professor Dr. Garnet Hertz’s work explores themes of DIY culture and interdisciplinary art/design practices. His work has been shown at several notable international venues including SIGGRAPH, Arts Electronica, and DEAF, and he was awarded the 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotic art. He is the founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based lecture series, has taught at the Art Center College of Design, the University of California, Irvine, and is now Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

You can find out more about Amber Frid-Jiminez here and about Garnet Hertz here .

Visualizing how your online behaviour is being tracked—Emily Carr University’s (Canada) Lightbeam

Before you got too excited this visualization tool is an add-on for Mozilla’s Firefox. That said, this seems pretty nifty, from the Oct. 30, 2013 Emily Carr University news release (Note: A link was removed),

“Emily Carr University’s visualization research for Lightbeam enables users to understand their personal relationship to online tracking,” says Emily Carr’s Amber Frid-Jimenez, Associate Professor, Faculty of Design + Dynamic Media.  She continues: “Our visualizations for Lightbeam will contribute to increased transparency about how personal information is collected and propagated by third parties, a key issue of online privacy.”

Here’s what one of the visualizations looks like,

Hypothesis 1: Browsing History [downloaded from http://research.ecuad.ca/simcentre/2013/10/28/press-package-lightbeam/]

Hypothesis 1: Browsing History [downloaded from http://research.ecuad.ca/simcentre/2013/10/28/press-package-lightbeam/]

The design team has this to say about the visualization (from their Hypothesis 1 webpage),

hypothesis #1
The Clock design aims to engage people who aren’t currently interested in privacy issues. The tool allows people to explore their own personal internet browsing history in daily, weekly, monthly and more longterm views.

There are more details about the Lightbeam project and the research team, from the news release,

Emily Carr University Research announces the launch of Lightbeam, a new Add-on for the popular Firefox browser that enables users to visualize online data tracking in real time. Mozilla, the developer of Firefox, partnered with the University on a year-long research project to improve Lightbeam’s interactive visualizations. The Emily Carr University team was led by Associate Professor Amber Frid-Jimenez, who worked with student design researchers Sabrina Ng, Joakim Sundal and Heather Tsang and a group of developers at Mozilla, led by Dethe Elza, to develop the visualizations of of the tool which will shed light on the online collection of information by third parties. This research was supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Mozilla Foundation, and is a project of the Social + Interactive Media (SIM) Centre, headed by Kate Armstrong.

The research team focused on three key areas of the visualization:

  • Browsing history: to interest users in privacy issues with an interface that facilitates exploration of their past browsing history and the third party connections that have been involved in this data;
  • Deep dive into time: to provide experts, power-users and those already interested in privacy issues with an interface that explores their relationships with trackers, and their enabling Web sites, to reveal patterns in the near term or over larger anonymized, aggregated datasets in the future;
  • Metrics as widgets: to provide users with an interface that displays simple figures and browsing history in real-time as single numbers and visual graphs.

The Lightbeam visualizations demonstrate the forward-looking research in social and interactive design provided by Emily Carr University. The Lightbeam visualizations will be important to helping web users understand the role of third party data tracking that shapes so much of the web and make informed choices about their data collection practices.

For anyone who wants to see the press package, you can find everything including the news release and images here.

While Emily Carr University is well known locally, it should be said that it’s located in Vancouver, Canada and it’s official name is Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

TRIUMF steps out: art/sci collaboration exhibition and CERN bigwig talks to Vancouverrites

Timidly to be sure but  TRIUMF (Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, located in Vancouver) is stepping out with a couple of public engagement projects.

First is the art/science collaboration between art students at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design and scientists at TRIUMF, which is being displayed at Science World. From the April 4, 2012 news release on the TRIUMF website,

For the first time, a collection of these pieces will be displayed at Science World in the Telus World of Science, Thursday, April 5 through Sunday, May 27, 2012. The pieces will be hung around the premises, providing visitors of all ages an opportunity to contemplate science from an artistic perspective.

“Through contemporary art in its many forms, the narrative of science enters the human story and becomes materially transformed,” says Associate Professor Ingrid Koenig, (TRIUMF’s Artist in Residence). “By visiting TRIUMF, students see examples of how the biggest questions about the universe are actually physically examined in a lab. They are surprised by the messiness factor, and puzzled by how the abstractness of physics comes to terms with human experience.”

Liz Toohey-Wiese (’11), one of the artists selected for this year’s exhibit, co-created a piece with Dan Crawford . They used typed words on recipe cards to visually explain a very strange concept in physics: particle duality in quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, a particle can exist in multiple states at once, until one is selected or chosen.

Says Toohey-Wiese, “I realized that quantum mechanics is like a day. Anything is possible in the morning when you wake up, and at the end of the day, you can look back and see what did happen.”

Toohey-Wiese/Crawford collaboration at Vancouver's Science World from April 5 - May 27, 2012

Unfortunately, this is not a very good image but hopefully you can get some idea of what Toohey-Wiese and Crawford are conveying.

I did check out the Science World website but was unable to find any reference to this art/sci collaboration show however I did find TRIUMF’s 2nd public engagement project, an evening talk (Sunday, June 3, 2012 from 6:30-8 pm, doors open at 6 pm) with CERN Director General Rolf Heuer titled, Unveiling the Universe. From the event webpage,

CERN Director General Rolf Heuer will speak at Science World at TELUS World of Science to engage the public with the many scientific adventures taking place at CERN, including ephemeral neutrinos that apparently disobeyed Einstein’s laws, doppelganger-like anti-atoms likely never before seen in the universe, and the frantic search for the one fundamental particle to rule them all, the Higgs. This free lecture takes place in the OMNIMAX® Theatre at Science World, and will be the opening lecture for the Physics at the Large Hadron Collider (PLHC) Conference by TRIUMF hosted at UBC the following week.

I suspect CERN (European Particle Physics Laboratory)  supplied this image, which I quite like,

CERN Director General Rolf Heuer

Free tickets can be ordered at www.plhc2012.eventbrite.ca. You may want to get your ticket soon, I think this is going to be very popular.